Monday, January 01, 2007

I know of few ways to deal with someone perishing as tragically as this.

On most mornings, I take a couple of minutes to scour the headlines on ESPN.com, just in case the Yankees have made a blockbuster trade, or coach Jeff Tedford has decided to leave the Golden Bear football team. Sometimes, though, I encounter stories that put my usual concerns in perspective. For instance, I still remember learning about the untimely death of Timberwolves' swingman Malik Sealy, whose car was hit by a drunk driver in May 2000.

Today, the site's top headline concerned the fatal shooting of Denver Broncos' cornerback Darrent Williams. I had watched the overtime period of Denver's game against San Francisco yesterday afternoon, in which the visiting 49ers hit a late field goal to eliminate the Broncos from the postseason. Not 24 hours later, I read that Williams' limousine, which contained 2 other passengers, had been sprayed with bullets in a drive-by attack.

I must stress that, to my knowledge, there has been no information released regarding motive or suspects at this time. However, I cannot help but remember an incident that occurred following Colombia's elimination from the 1994 World Cup. Soccer player Andrés Escobar, who scored an own goal in Colombia's game against the United States, was later murdered in the Colombian capital of Bogotá . While I cannot recall a single incident that would have made Williams alone an object of ire, I get an eerie feeling when I link the outcome of the Broncos' game with the senseless act that followed it. Furthermore, this was not the result of a violent encounter at a bar, but rather what would appear to be a premeditated assault on a specific vehicle. At the least, I would expect that this was not a random act, unlike the unfortunate but unintentional sequence that led to the passing of Sealy.

I hope that, in the future, it will be more difficult to obtain ready access to weapons that can have such damaging consequences. In the meantime, however, I am upset as a sports fan and as a person. It is a terrible shame when any human being is lost in this way, and it hits quite close to home when the victim is an athlete I have observed over the course of a season on idyllic Sunday afternoons. In the words of analyst Mark Schlereth: "There's no reason we should be writing eulogies for 24-year old kids."